Connect the Dots
by MarshmellowDragon
Summary: Ace, Dragon, Garp, Luffy and their dysfunctional family unit. /unfortunately, no longer canon compliant/


"_Heirlooms we don't have in our family. But stories we've got."_

-Rose Cherin

* * *

When Gol D. Roger is 22 years of age, he stops off at the island of Buru and spends the night with a barmaid. After the ship is restocked, he's gone again.

Nine months later, the same barmaid is finally finding a use for all the colorful words that she's picked up from various sailors over the years, screaming so loudly and clearly that even the doctors in the rooms down the hall are blushing to the tips of their ears. The child is a little girl with a mop of dark brown hair and is named something or other, in the honor of some long dead aunt. By the time the girl is six it doesn't matter what her name is because the freckles which splash across her face, down her shoulders and spread across her back have earned her a large wealth of nicknames, all of which more widely used than her given label.

Time and life move on, and the little girl becomes a teenager, then a young woman, and by the time she's 21, not only does she have a good six or seven half siblings, she and her mother work the same shift at the Gouden Bar on their little island of Buru. Though by now, Mama's the bartender and she's the pretty little thing who ends up in the back rooms with the sailors. But she's careful, unlike Mama. There's only one baby, a stillborn, and honestly Barmaid knows its better that way. She just waits her tables with a smile for the men, gives them their rum and asks for news of the world in exchange.

That's how she meets Monkey D. Dragon, who, at the time, is nothing more than a little upstart with big dreams that involve toppling the government. The guy has a swordsman, Don Diego or Don Vega or Don Dela (it's hard to tell, the guy's so paranoid about his bright green hair that he changes his name every week), a little dingy that barely holds the two of them, and a tattoo.

He tells her stories, lots of stories, stories that seem so far removed from her tiny island and the little bar that she can scarcely believe them. Floating islands, arrogant nobles, mermaids, angry marines…it's stupid but it feels like he opens up a part of her that she'd left behind when she was born into the world. Dragon and the swordsman hang around for a while they look for some bounty work to ease the cashflow and keep their eyes out for a competent few hands, maybe even a proper ship, and the barmaid doesn't complain even when the pair get too rowdy and start scaring off customers. Barmaid just keeps on listening. Mama listens to the stories too, but only half-heartedly and half-listening. Remind her too much of the men that left her behind, she says. Barmaid doesn't pay much attention to the warning.

One day, she asks about the tattoo. He shuts up and doesn't speak to her for days. So she loosens him up in the only way she knows how.

When they wake up tangled in each other's arms, still a little sweaty and sticking together around the hips, hair plastered back, lips bruised and necks covered in little red marks, he talks. It's not a happy story, not all that invigorating, and it involves him and nobles and a nasty collar and the way that one of them thought he'd make a good savage man for their little play if they tattooed his face _just right…_

"My old man pulled every string on the damn puppet." He finishes. "And it only worked because the bastards had so much fun laughing at a vice-admiral with his tail between his legs. I'm going to change that."

"Take me with you." Is her answer. Because she _wants_ those stories to become her reality. He does so, with a slightly larger ship, a few more sympathetics and a destination in the island of Del. It's a barren place, and they have to import practically everything, but it's necessary, he says, for a revolutionary to be hard to reach. She just wishes that he could have been harder to reach a _little_ closer to a grocer.

A year and a half later, her stomach begins to swell.

Eight or nine months after that, she's the one swearing up a storm. She's also holding a shovel for some _strange_ reason and keeps on trying to maul the doctors with it. When she falls asleep in the middle of the birth, things only get worse.

The kid is named Ace, in honor of the final card for Barmaid's straight flush in the poker game that won them the money to afford the brat's crib. Freckles abound, and it's not an uncommon sight to find both mother and son fast asleep in the middle of feeding time. Dragon walks in on the scene more than once, and for a split second, considers that maybe, just _maybe_ he could leave the world as it is. The thought is crushed with amazing severity, but to this day, Barmaid is the only one who ever evoked such a train of thought.

And with the most gradual of changes, the revolution slowly picks up momentum. A few more members here, a donated ship there, a toppled warlord back yonder, the results make Dragon smile. And while Barmaid is glad that he's happy, she has yet to see the great wide world that she imagined. Just the inside of a barren castle. No mermaids, no giants, no rivers that flow uphill. But, she reasons, maybe they'll come with time. Ace is too small to appreciate the sites anyway. Maybe, maybe when he's grown up a little more they'll go. Just the three of them.

Their first fight, their first serious and drawn out fight, erupts when Ace offers his ball to his pops. After the first "no", a second, and a third, Dragon finally knocks the thing away and turns back to the latest report from his men in the Drum Kingdom. Barmaid comes running at the cry of her baby, and scolds Dragon, who then yells that he can do whatever the hell he wants if this stupid kid is gonna keep bothering him during business like this. This launches her on a rant on how he never plays with the kid _anyway_ so what gives him the right to start complaining now and…! He starts on how _she_ wanted to come with _him_ because she got the _stupid_ idea in her head that being a revolutionary was all daisies and romance when in reality it's not…!

Ace crawls away after fifteen solid minutes of screaming. The two parents are on speaking terms again, eventually, but Barmaid starts to wonder why she left home if all she was going to do was spend the rest of her life playing wife to a whole revolution without so much as a speck of thanks. It's Ace who interrupts her gloomy mood and demands to be fed, changed and played with, so she obliges for the sake of the one man…boy…infant who she still has hope will never abandon her.

This time, when her stomach swells, Dragon isn't there to feel the baby kicking. Ace does, and she swears up and down that his giggle from feeling those tiny feet is the only thing that's keeping her sane. She continues on, life as usual, fixes the drinks for the tired men, cooks their meals, bandages up their scrapes and bruises, does their laundry and fixes their clothes when their domestic skills just aren't up to par. It's not quite as conundrum as back home, since her medical duties sometimes expand to men who lose an arm or a leg or a head, but she's still missing that taste of the world at large.

This time, when she goes into labour, there's no Dragon to try and steal the shovel away from her. Luffy pops into the world with the image of his mother screaming and waving around a gardening instrument. He can't giggle or laugh quite yet, but he baffles the doctors by smiling for Mama. And when Ace pokes the bundle of fat and fluff a few hours later, he isn't able to get his finger loose for a good 30 minutes. Grasp reflex, supplies one of the doctors who's conveniently on hand; Very common in infants. As soon as they catch anything in their palm they don't like to let it go.

"S'not an in-funt." Ace mutters. "Luf's a monster." The new big brother is very, _very_ lucky that someone had the good sense to steal away Barmaid's shovel when no one was looking. Otherwise he might have found his nose smashed in. As it was, he had to deal with throbbing buttcheeks and his mother screaming that he has to be nice to his baby brother.

When Luffy is six months old, Marines find the hideout. They're nowhere near headquarters, and out in these parts, the only things the superiors care about are results. So if they have to kill a kid or a woman or any other innocent to get their way, few lose any sleep over it. When marines burst into the kitchen where Ace is helping her with the dishes and Luffy is dosing off to sleep by the sink, Barmaid doesn't think twice, she dives for the children and makes it about halfway to the floor before the bullet sinks into the back of her skull. Dragon bursts in just as they're about to turn over the body and get at the boys, and before they know it, it's the marines who are the ones falling to the ground with bullets through the back of their heads.

Ace screams something or other as Dragon turns on his heel, and to this day he can only remember that it had to do with saving his Mama. Dragon doesn't answer, or maybe Ace just can't hear it over the roar of explosions and fighting and bloodshed in general throughout the rest of the hideout. The father just keeps on running until he's out of sight, and Ace never forgives him for it.

Hands bloody from trying to stop the blood and cheeks tear-stained from the hiccupping and sobbing mess that he's melted into, the older brother hides under the kitchen sink and holds onto his little brother like their lives depend on it. He doesn't stop shaking until Luffy starts crying, and by then, his own tears have fired back up again so they're just this one big pile of soppy wet salty wussiness and Ace wants to scream at something or someone or anything because it's _not fair_ and that's his _Mama_ and Papa didn't care and…and…and he's the big brother, and he's supposed to be doing something as the big brother, but its really hard 'cuz Mama's dead and…

"Shhhh, -hiccup- Luffy. Shhh. Ace's here." It's hard to rock the kid like Mama does (_did_), since Luffy's heavy and all that stuff, but he tries, and for his efforts, the crying stops. He even manages to coax out a yawn from the baby before he dozes off too.

"Aaaasuu."

When Dragon, bleeding from a gaping chest wound, missing a good chunk of an ear and extremely thankful that his men wiped out the marines before they themselves were slaughtered, finds the two curled up under the sink, he only snorts and drags them out. Kids. He doesn't look at the body on the floor, but he does hope that she finally got her wish to roam free.

Six hours after the attack, Monkey D. Garp picks up the receiver on his Den Den Mushi and hears a voice he had thought would never speak to him again. The instructions are simple and to the point. Garp is to go to Buru island and pick up his two grandsons from the dock. He is then to make them strong as they could ever hope to be, and Dragon promises that one day he'll come to take them back.

Ace spends his fourth birthday on a lonely dock with nothing to do but feed his brother and hope that this grandpa of his shows up sooner or later. He holds a picture of his Mama and imagines that she's there too.

When Gramps arrives, he literally sweeps Ace (Luffy, backpack and all) off his feet in one giant arm, and promptly retreats to his ship. The old man doesn't speak until they're in his quarters, and the first thing that leaves his mouth is that Ace is a _very_ scrawny kid. He then gives the kid a cowboy hat of all things and demands that Ace wear it at all times because his hair is so oily and messy looking that Garp can't bare to lay eyes on it. Luffy sleeps peacefully through the violence that follows.

They end up at Fuschia Village, which is supposedly their hometown, but Ace can't connect the dots between his blood and the quiet town, so he tries to imagine that this is only a pitstop or a vacation, and fails miserably, mostly because the place grows on him with the forests to be explored and the rivers to swim in and the animals to poke and the sudden absence of nothing but sand. Garp lets him have his fun for about…oh…a year before he starts his INTENSIVE TRAINING OF LOVE course.

Gramps leaves on business when Ace is eight and Luffy is semi-close to turning five. It's a cold February morning when the older brother wakes up, not from a wakeup punch of love, but because the younger brother is shoving something in his face and begging him to read it to him. The letter is short and filled with a lot of crap about danger and pirates and revolutions, and Ace doesn't bother telling the truth and mumbles something around the lines of "Gramps went on an adventure" before he goes back to sleep. Makino takes pity on them when they show up at the bar, starving, and Ace suddenly becomes a passable chef under her watchful eye. Luffy gets thrown out of the kitchen after the sixth time of trying to pass himself off as a ghost by rolling in flour.

When Luffy is seven and Ace is ten, a pirate ship pulls into port. The captain is Red-haired Shanks and when it becomes evident that he's more interested in partying than pillaging, Luffy drags him to Makino's bar for interrogation about all his adventures and the rest, as they say, is history.

* * *

_So…OP suddenly decided to take over my brain, which is really weird, and not all that appreciated around exam time. Go figure. Anywho, I think Luffy and Ace and Garp are pretty cool, and Dragon is all mysterious and crap, and I decided that Mama Monkey (Portgas) doesn't need a first name. Gah, I just want to do my history homework, and this thing came up! Graaaaagle. Excuse my poor writing skills by giving me some nice criticism?_

_Random side note: correct me if I'm wrong...but is this the ONLY piece that has Dragon as a character? for shame :P  
_


End file.
